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Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

The emissions per capita of that thing must be huge.

Hopefully in a couple of decades such energetic excesses will be condemned by humanity.

I think we should be fine with it if there's more than enough taxes on emissions.

And there should be luxury taxes too. The super-rich get this shit on discount (20% capital gains in the U.S.?), while most of us have to pay upwards of 40% extra for doing salaried work. It's not right.

agreed! Capital gains tax should be the same as income tax! Why is it that a secretary pays more taxes (percentage-wise) than his/her boss?

Even Marxists want playboys to buy Lamborghinis, because then the rich have less money. The real answer to what you're calling for would be to match capital gains with income taxes, although I'm sure that would have its own raft of unexpected effects. (For example, what would happen to middle-class retirement plans?)

Also: emissions taxes are sometimes regressive, for example consider that home prices usually go up with shorter commutes.

Since the most universal benefit of having money is getting the first pick of all the options, you'll quickly find that "those rich people" are incredibly hard to pin down with tax plans. Whatever you make the worst asset class will quickly end up in the hands of whoever can't afford better.

Well we shouldn't give up on reining in profiteers and tax-evaders. It's the good fight. Oh and re: middle class retirement plans, the more the gains the more the tax.

> (For example, what would happen to middle-class retirement plans?)

I agree with most of what you said (I'm sure there will be unintended consequences). However that specific consequence...

The middle class has largely no retirement savings at all (median savings for even 50+ yr old household is about one year's income). To the extent that the middle class has retirement savings, it falls way, way, way under the pretax tax advantaged account limits for 401k, IRA, etc. Capital gains tax on retirement savings is a problem only for the upper upper middle class who can afford to stock away more than like 20k/yr into retirement.

Anyone know how feasible it would be to run this on solar power in the near future?

Not really, it wouldn't even be feasible to replace the on-board electric with solar, ignoring propulsion. Using the information from here[1] it has five generators. One generator produces 4308kVA, and one of these [2] solar panels produces 0.296 kVA. So ~15,000 solar panels to replace one (of five) generator.

1 http://www.ship-technology.com/projects/world/

2 https://www.wholesalesolar.com/1977425/astronergy/solar-pane...

Thanks for the info. Hopefully future breakthroughs can change this math substantially.

They can't, these solar panels are probably not much more than 20% efficient, so even an extra factor of five doesn't make a dent.

In a couple of decades, it will likely be too late.

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